Top Kerry James Marshall Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Kerry James Marshall Biography

Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist born in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design. An exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016.

Read about Kerry James Marshall in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Kerry James Marshall Quotes

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.

Artist, Artists, Comics, Gateway, Gateways, People

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

Account, Color, Legacy, Reality, White

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful. . . and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

Beautiful, Black, Blackness, Powerful, Think, Thinking

In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.

Capital, Kind, Organized, Social, Start, Ways

You can describe [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self] as a manifesto of sorts. I saw it as a pivotal turn, a work that really led me down the avenues that brought me to where I am. That picture was the vehicle that helped me clarify a lot of things and I began to understand that I wanted to do.

Artist, Down, Picture, Self, Shadow, Sorts

Comics were a place where captivating images lit your imagination and showed you that you can create new kinds of people and worlds.

Captivating, Imagination, People, Showed, World

No one has a right to occupy the privileged position all the time, so it should be contested. It should always be messy in there.

Messy, Position, Right, Should, Time

For black people in the western hemisphere, if you can't generate a mythology that creates models of heroism and power out of the mythology that you had, then that means that somehow the mythology you had was not only feeble and weak, but that you are ultimately a powerless people. That's a notion that, I think, that can't be accepted.

Heroism, Mean, Mythology, Notion, People, Thinking

The privileged position of whiteness doesn't allow for someone with one drop of Negro blood to be considered white, which allows whiteness to be a fairly pure category while blackness has to absorb an expansive reality of representation.

Blood, Drop, Pure, Reality, Representation, White

If you're constantly being reminded of the ways in which your history and your narrative as a people were rooted in loss and decay, then you're in deep trouble. Once you make a certain kind of peace with the past, then you should be completely oriented towards speculation about the future.

Certain, Loss, Oriented, Past, People, Ways

The moment you introduce difference into a museum, then the privileged space is contested, and under the most ideal circumstances what all artists want is the chance to be competitive. That's what I think the museum is supposed to be.

Artist, Artists, Museums, Space, Supposed, Thinking

I want people to understand that this is a very calibrated image [Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], where point by point, very little is left to chance.

Artist, Calibrated, People, Portrait, Self, Shadow

What I preserved in the figures [at Invisible Man] are those white eyes and white teeth, because that's still connected to the way in which blackness, in the extreme, has been stigmatized and the way it was often joked that you couldn't see black people in the dark until they had their eyes open or were smiling.

Dark, Extreme, Eye, Joked, Man, Men

I think we need to remember. . . that a lot of energy was put into changing things to get us to the point where we are now. But being where we are now doesn't mean that we don't have to put in the same kind of energy to get us to a place where we ought to be.

Changing, Energy, Mean, Remember, Same, Thinking

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

Blackness, Color, People, Understanding, Using, Wide

Part of what I am dealing with, with this blackness, is asking the question, "Where are those black people, who are as dark as the description of a young black boy that Solomon Northup gives in 12 Years A Slave?" He describes the young black 14-year-old boy as "blacker than any crow. " You have to question if he is using that metaphorically or as a descriptive?

Boys, Dark, Metaphorically, Slave, Years, Young

Comics also led a lot of young people to science fiction.

Comics, Fiction, People, Science, Science Fiction

I really just want to be an inspiration. I'm a regular guy, that had a dream, that came from a small town, that wanted to play guitar and just liked playing. I want to encourage people.

Came, Dream, Guitar, Guy, Inspiration, Liked

I think the museum should be an arena in which ideals can hash it out, fight it out, tooth and nail, for attention.

Fighting, Hash, Museum, Museums, Thinking, Tooth

Before people outside of the Western European tradition started asking to be in there, the people who were accumulating objects for the museum were perfectly satisfied with the narrative they were constructing.

Asking, Museums, Narrative, People, Satisfied, Western

1